From translations for the readers of fiction and for the theatre, he advanced to free adaptations, and from these to work which may be called truly original. Directed by the Abbe de Lyonne to Spanish literature, he endeavoured in his early plays to preserve what was brilliant and ingenious in the works of Spanish dramatists, and to avoid what was strained and extravagant. In his _Crispin Rival de son Maitre_ (1707), in which the roguish valet aspires to carry off his master's betrothed and her fortune, he borrows only the idea of Mendoza's play; the conduct of the action, the dialogue, the characters are his own. His prose story of the same year, _Le Diable Boiteux_, owes but little to the suggestion derived from Guevara; it is, in fact, more nearly related to the _Caracteres_ of La Bruyere; when Asmodeus discloses what had been hidden under the house-roofs of the city, a succession of various human types are presented, and, as in the case of La Bruyere, contemporaries attempted to identify these with actual living persons. In his remarkable satiric comedy _Turcaret_, and in his realistic novel _Gil Blas_, Lesage enters into full possession of his own genius. _Turcaret, ou le Financier_, was completed early in 1708; the efforts of the financiers to hinder its performance served in the end to enhance its brief and brilliant success. The pitiless amasser of wealth, Turcaret, is himself the dupe of a coquette, who in her turn is the victim of a more contemptible swindler. Lesage, presenting a fragment of the manners and morals of his day, keeps us in exceedingly ill company, but the comic force of the play lightens the oppression of its repulsive characters. It is the first masterpiece of the eighteenth-century _comedie de moeurs_.